Technical Mission Director

Defense Unicorns | Senior Technical Delivery Leadership

Role Description

Defense Unicorns is seeking a senior Technical Mission Director to embed with a government team leading a fast-moving, multi-vendor AI and software modernization effort. This role owns day-to-day execution across government stakeholders, engineering teams, and commercial technology partners, creating the structure and tempo needed to move from prototype to operational capability.

The ideal candidate is an Agile delivery leader with strong technical fluency across modern software, cloud, DevSecOps, AI/ML, data, and platform engineering. They must be credible with engineers and senior government leaders, able to run Scrum in a high-tempo environment, and comfortable turning ambiguity into decisions, priorities, and action.

Responsibilities

• Own day-to-day execution for a multidisciplinary government/industry team and establish the Agile operating rhythm, including Scrum ceremonies, backlog management, sprint planning, reviews, retrospectives, and release planning.
• Coordinate government stakeholders and multiple technology vendors, keeping priorities, dependencies, milestones, and technical risks visible and driving blockers to resolution.
• Lead daily cross-vendor synchronization without allowing meetings to become a substitute for execution; create clear owners, decisions, and next actions.
• Maintain an integrated delivery plan and communicate concise updates on mission outcomes, technical risk, resource needs, decisions, and schedule.
• Work closely with the Technical Solutions Architect and engineering leads across platform, DevSecOps, data, and AI/agentic disciplines to keep execution aligned with the evolving architecture.
• Maintain enough technical depth to recognize integration, security, data, deployment, or architecture issues early and engage the right experts quickly.
• Coordinate the transition from prototype environments into classified operational environments, including readiness, dependencies, and increasing onsite/SCIF collaboration.
• Act as a trusted technical thought partner to government customers: surface risks, frame options, challenge assumptions constructively, and help translate mission needs into executable technical priorities.
• Identify follow-on mission needs, expansion opportunities, and adjacent use cases; understand the customer's acquisition and buying motion and partner with DU growth leadership to shape actionable opportunities.
• Capture lessons learned and repeatable delivery patterns, continuously reducing coordination overhead and improving engineering velocity.